Evidence of meeting #16 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was documents.
A video is available from Parliament.
12:40 p.m.
Liberal
Scott Andrews Liberal Avalon, NL
You mentioned about 1,370 and you said 1,000 were the criminal aspect and 70 were the other one. What were the other 300? Do you have a little breakdown?
12:40 p.m.
Director General, Passport Program Integrity Branch, Department of Citizenship and Immigration
I do. About 225 were for entitlement fraud or passport misuse. Allowing somebody else to use their passport, for instance, would be an example of that. Of the total number, 36 were for citizenship issues, so the individual was not in fact a citizen of Canada.
12:40 p.m.
NDP
The Chair NDP Pat Martin
Everybody has concluded.
Thank you, Scott.
Next and finally will be Tilly O'Neill Gordon for seven minutes.
12:40 p.m.
Conservative
Tilly O'Neill-Gordon Conservative Miramichi, NB
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank all of you for taking time to be with us today.
This is my first time on this committee, and I look forward to the information and what this study will bring forth. Your presentation here today certainly gave us lots of information. It's information we often think about but I guess we never follow up to see just how it all ends up.
It certainly is of great benefit to all of us here today to know that Canada ranks so highly on the stage of security and with other countries as well. That was a key factor to hear as well.
Someone already asked this, but I was just wondering. You talked about the capacity within the passport program integrity branch to conduct administrative investigations to determine ongoing entitlement to a passport or entitlement to future services. You mentioned some of the many reasons an individual can be refused a passport. You talked about incarceration and other ideas. But once they have lost their passport, how long will they have lost it for? How do they go about getting it back, or do they ever get it back?
12:45 p.m.
Director, Investigation Division, Passport Program Integrity Branch, Department of Citizenship and Immigration
I can answer that question.
The withheld service period that is usually imposed on individuals is five years from the date of the incident. We take administrative investigations very seriously.
We know there's a charter right to travel. Canadians have a charter right to travel, so even while they're on withheld service during that five-year period, we let the individual apply for a one-time passport to visit a relative in another country for urgent, compelling, compassionate reasons. They can have as many of those as they want during that withheld period of service; they just can't have a permanent passport for a five-year period.
We're quite cognizant of the fact that individuals still need to travel, and we do approve urgent, compelling, compassionate passport applications, but usually it's a five-year period of withheld service.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
Tilly O'Neill-Gordon Conservative Miramichi, NB
I was happy to hear you say as well that with this new ePassport the security is so much higher. Is this the only kind of passport that's going to be distributed now? Everyone who applies from here on in will be getting an ePassport?
12:45 p.m.
Director General, Passport Program Integrity Branch, Department of Citizenship and Immigration
Yes. The ePassport is the only passport that's available to Canadians as of July 1, 2013. The only difference is the choice in terms of the validity period of the passport: either a five-year passport or a ten-year validity passport.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
Tilly O'Neill-Gordon Conservative Miramichi, NB
Yes. So now do they have to go into an office and apply? Because a lot of people would not have.... Or do they apply on their own computers?
12:45 p.m.
Director General, Passport Program Integrity Branch, Department of Citizenship and Immigration
You can actually go to the website, the Passport Canada website, and fill out a form online, but currently you have to print it and then either take that form to an office or mail it in to Passport Canada, or take it into one of our Service Canada receiving agents or Canada Post.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
Tilly O'Neill-Gordon Conservative Miramichi, NB
So they wouldn't absolutely need a computer or computer skills. They could go into an office and still have their service that way.
12:45 p.m.
Director General, Passport Program Integrity Branch, Department of Citizenship and Immigration
Absolutely.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
Tilly O'Neill-Gordon Conservative Miramichi, NB
I was just wondering what's best for Canadians to do to combat these phishing messages, the malware, and the traffic rerouting, because we certainly are seeing that happen more and more every day with these great technical things that we have in technology now. I'm wondering what more we can do as Canadians to prevent this.
12:45 p.m.
Director General, Office of Consumer Affairs, Department of Industry
Well, in your package here, we have a number of suggestions about what you can do to protect yourself online, particularly with things like phishing tactics and so forth.
The biggest piece of advice, I think, is to be very careful. The fundamental issue is this: don't reveal personal information online unless you understand very carefully who it is you're dealing with. If it's someone who you know and trust, then that's one issue, but certainly most respectable businesses and institutions do not request that you send in valuable personal information cold, online.
Unfortunately, criminal practitioners in this area often do prey on these kinds of emotional appeals. For example, the typical kind of stratagem is an email that you would receive that would look very official, from a bank, for example, saying that there's been some problem with the security of your account and asking you to contact them online. When you contact them online—or even in some cases, phone them, but certainly contacting them online—you're asked to present personal information. Banks never do that.
So really, it's about being extremely careful about situations in which you provide your personal information. You do that only in circumstances where, for example, you're applying legitimately for a piece of identification, or a credit card, or some other situation. But the point is to be very aware of out-of-the-blue, unsolicited inquiries and entreaties to engage with somebody, in the course of which you're asked for some kind of sensitive personal information. That's when you always need to be careful.
In other words, if you initiate it yourself, that's fine. You want to apply for a credit card and you go to a bank, you fill in a form, and so forth. But when someone contacts you out of the blue, even when it is the bank, and says that something's gone wrong and they need your personal information, don't respond to that. Go directly back to the institution yourself and inquire with your own bank branch, for example, if there is a problem, because you need to be very careful when people ask for personal information out of the blue. That's the bottom line here.
12:50 p.m.
Conservative
Tilly O'Neill-Gordon Conservative Miramichi, NB
More and more we need to get that message out on how we can make people listen to that and not jump at the first thing because sometimes people just become nervous or curious as to what went wrong with their banking and automatically give the information that they shouldn't. So that's a very important message we need to get out more and more.
12:50 p.m.
NDP
The Chair NDP Pat Martin
Actually, you are out of time, so sorry, Tilly.
Thank you very much.
Thank you to all of our witnesses. We are going to conclude our questioning with that.
Mr. Fernandes, Mr. Bulatovic, and Mr. Jenkin, it was very helpful and we may in fact need some more input from you as we proceed with our study, but we'll certainly call on you if we do.
I'm going to suspend the meeting briefly, then, and we'll reconvene in camera just for five minutes or so.
The meeting is adjourned.
[Proceedings continue in camera]